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Xiaoxu Liu is a PhD candidate at the Department of Teacher Education at the University of Helsinki. After getting her BA and MA in education from Northeast Normal University in China, she started her doctoral study at the University of Helsinki in 2015. She also studied in National Pingtung University in Taiwan for half a year as an exchange student.

Her research interests include comparative education, multicultural education and Chinese minority education. Her latest article ‘The Meanings of Multicultural Education: Comparing Perspectives from China and Finland’ will be published in Dervin and Du’s book series with Palgrave MacMillan in 2017. She is working on another article 'Students and Teachers' Attitude towards Preferential Policies for Minorities in China: A case study of National Institute of Education’. Xiaoxu is also a member of research projects Helsinki University Chinese Studies and Criticality, Interculturality and Bias in Education.

Zero Conditionality: The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism and China's Foreign AidRuvimbo is focusing on China’s increasing cooperation with African authoritarian regimes and its effect on democratisation. She has done extensive research on Democracy in divided societies, Democracy promotion, Aid, African politics and Gender and development. Prior to her engagement in Finland, Ruvimbo worked with the Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN) coordinating election Monitoring and Observation in the run-up and during Zimbabwe’s 2013 Presidential election.

Asia in Focus is a peer-reviewed journal published online twice a year by NIAS – Nordic Institute of Asian Studies. Asia in Focus provides Master students and Ph.D. students affiliated to a European institution a widely accessible and transnational forum to publish their findings. The focal point of the journal is the modern Asian societies viewed from the standpoints of social science and humanities. The geographical focus is the Asian countries from Central Asia to Oceania excluding Australia and New Zealand. We aim at a high academic level in a concise, focused and readable form, and publish both academic essays and academic articles.

We are seeking full papers (approx. 3500 words) for the next issue of Asia in Focus. The papers which may take an academic article or academic essay format, should pertain to contemporary issues in modern Asia and be rooted in the social sciences or humanities.

We are also accepting book reviews of no more than 1000 words. Choose a title of your own choice that fits with the focus of the journal, or choose from the NIAS Press titles here: www.asiainfocus.dk/book-reviews

The deadline for submissions is 1 February 2018 and accepted papers will be published spring/summer 2018.

While visiting NIAS, Tullia is exploring empirical material from a recent field trip to Mysore, India. This data set consists of interviews, photos from inside supermarkets and notes from trips to laundromats and washing locales. Tullia is hoping to use this material to; understand how cleanliness norms are changing, and consider changing norms’ potential impacts on water and energy consumption.

radical young women perceive and engage with the chat groups they themselves are part of. Based on

in-depth interviews, it studies how feminists play along with, disapprove of, fight, or ignore the sexism,

classism and casteism expressed by family members.

The outlined article is a part his doctoral work titled “Political Daughterhood – Feminist middle-class daughters and intra-family political conflicts in Delhi, India”. Before joining the PhD programme, Otso has lived some three years in metropolitan India and done his master’s in Asian studies from Lund University, Sweden.

Tibetan History Telling on the Indo-Chinese Border: a Case Study of The Tibet Mirror (1949-1959)

The Tibet Mirror is popularly believed to be the first newspaper in the Tibetan language established and issued by the editor of Tibetan origin. The newspaper came out in Kalimpong, the city located on the main Indo-Tibetan trade route and renowned for its transcultural mixture of people and ideas. After the major Tibetan uprising in 1959 the Tibetans coming from China were either passing Kalimpong on their way into exile or settling there. Thus, the editor of The Tibet Mirror Dorje Tharchin had an advantage to get first hand news from Tibet and to compile contemporaneous chronicles of events in Tibet in his newspaper.

A number of aspects of modern Tibetan history present a venue for interpretation and discussions, especially the history of Tibet under the Chinese communist rule. Contending stories of pro-Tibetan and pro-Chinese authors clash and collide and it seems particularly interesting to see what Dorje Tharchin had to say and what kind of policy he followed in The Tibet Mirror. Despite the changes in the Indo-Chinese relations, Tharchin had his own stance and did collaborate neither with the Chinese communists nor with the Indian government.

YiTing Lee, MA student, University of Oslo

Women fleeing from Tibet: cause, exiled experience and future

YiTing Lee is from Taiwan. She did her bachelor in the department of public administration of political science. She is now studying gender studies at University of Oslo in Norway, doing a thesis related to Tibet and gender.

Cultural anthropologist Ida Nicolaisen, Senior Researcher at NIAS, has successfully completed a major research initiative: The Carlsberg Foundation Nomad Research Project with the publication of Mongol Herders (2017). The book is by Christel Braae and the fifteenth and last volume in a series of major publications, which is the outcome of the research effort. It is the third among these about the Mongols, the other volumes being Martha Boyer: Mongol Jewelry (1995), and Henny Harald Hansen: Mongol Costumes (1993). Denmark has a century old scholarly tradition of studying pastoral nomads in the wide belt of deserts and steppes, which reach from Mauretania, across the Sahara and Middle East through Central Asia and into China. Many of these research endeavors brought back huge collections of documents, photos, recordings of oral histories and music, thousands of ethnographic specimen: tents, clothing, jewelry and utensils now in Danish museums as well as data on pastoral histories, subsistence patterns, trade, craftsmanship, cultures and social life. In view of the fact, that continued fieldwork among nomadic peoples in Afghanistan and Chad had in fact become impossible by the 1980s, that a huge amount of valuable cultural and social anthropological research from various pastoral peoples nomads was largely unpublished, and that the ethnographic collections had not been scientifically described, the research project was launched in 1986. In 1992 Ida Nicolaisen was appointed Editor-in- Chief of the publications, initially planned as seven volumes, but over time the publications grew to more than the double to cope with the huge amount of scientific material. Ida Nicolaisen has authored three of the volumes herself: The Pastoral Tuareg I-II, (1997)(with J. Nicolaisen) and Elusive Hunters. The Haddad of Kanem and the Bahr-el-Ghazal (2007). Besides these, she has edited the other volumes in the series including Esther Fihl: Exploring Central Asia I-II (2002), which describes Ole Olufsen’s travels in Turkmenistan, Kirghizstan and the Pamirs; four volumes on Afghan pastoral nomads: Birthe Frederiksen: Caravans and Trade in Afghanistan( 1995); Gorm Pedersen: Afghan Nomads (1994); Asta Olesen: Afghan Craftsmen (1994); and Klaus Ferdinand: Afghan Nomads(2006). Included is also Schuyler Jones: Tibetan Nomads (1996), which describes Prince Peter’s impressive ethnographic collection from Tibet; Inge Demant Mortensen: Nomads of Luristan (1993); and Klaus Ferdinand: Bedouins of Qatar 1993).

Network relations and internationalization of smaller Nordic firms exporting to the Japanese market

I am a second-year Ph.D. student at the School of Business, University of Iceland. My research interests are internationalization and entry-mode research, network relations and the role of trade intermediaries, specifically in relation to Icelandic, Danish and Swedish small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) exporting to the Japanese market. This is a qualitative research with in-depth interviews with managers and trade agents. The theoretical basis of the research is predominately from the Uppsala Internationalization process model.

The purpose of my thesis project is to investigate the national cultural differences between Danish and Chinese partners in government-to-government cooperation projects that constitute barriers to the knowledge sharing process. The methodology applied is a qualitative approach inspired by the critical incident methodology techniques of studying intercultural encounters and communication through a combination of observation studies and semi-structured interviews. The main finding of this thesis is that the cultural difference in power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and time orientation makes knowledge sharing processes between Danish and Chinese partners difficult.

From July 4th to 14th, 42 participants, with 19 from the Nordic countries and 23 from Asia, together with 18 lecturers and speakers, joined the first Nansen East-West Dialogue Academy (NEWDAY) at Nansen Academy, Lillehammer, Norway. NEWDAY was initiated and co-organized by the Fudan-European Centre for China Studies, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS), and Nansen Academy.

Aiming to promote mutual understanding and foster harmonious relations between people East and West and between our future leaders, participants were brought together to engage in dialogues, debates, workshops, and lectures through the competent guidance of high profile guest speakers and lecturers, including a broad range of international scholars from a variety of disciplines, people from NIAS and the Fudan Centre, and many others.

The topics discussed included some of the pressing challenges of today’s world such as the Korean Peninsula, new media and political populism, and climate change, as well as other topics such as education, the Nordic model, and cross-cultural communication. Furthermore, the program featured a number of excursions and artistic performances.

The program was structured as below:

Day 1: Introduction

Day 2: Grand Challenges

Day 3: Cross-Cultural Understanding

Day 4: Traditional and New Media

Day 5: Animosities in International Politics

Day 6 & 7: Green Agenda in a Good Society (a two day excursion)

Day 8: Science, Education and Society

Day 9: Memory and Identity

Day 10: Unity with Diversity

NIAS felt privileged to take part in facilitating the first NEWDAY summer course. NEWDAY was supported by a range of scholars from institutions in the East Asian region, specifically Fudan University, Tsinghua University and Shandong University in China; Kyoto University and Tokai University in Japan; and Yonsei University and Korea University in Korea. In the Nordic region, NIAS and the Fudan-European Centre for China Studies at the University of Copenhagen representing a consortium of 27 Nordic universities, was the leading coordinator of the project, together with the Nansen Academy.

NEWDAY was funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers (NCM), the Fudan-European Centre for China Studies, and the Nansen Academy with support from the Trilateral Cooperation Secretariat (TCS).

Elena Samonova is a PhD Student from University of Helsinki, and her project is titled:

Agricultural bonded labour in Nepal and India: human rights based approach to sustainable social change

In my PhD project I am looking at the human rights as a tool of social resistance and liberation and seek to answer the question how the human rights discourse is able to enhance sustainable social change and support the liberation of the most oppressed groups of people. In particular, I study the impacts of the rights-based programs for bondage labourers among Tharu people in Nepal and Sahariya people in India. In both cases, debt bondage is closely connected with the historical dispossession and oppression of the indigenous population. It was found that human rights discourse is able to contribute to the creation of new spaces for resistance and support redistribution of power at the micro level. However, such rights-based programs seem to have little impact at the macro level of power relations and can not effectively challenge structural inequality embedded in the society.

Lise Bjerke is a Master Student from University of Oslo, and her project is titled:

Migrants on the margins of the city: Food security rights among internal migrants in Bangalore, India

Why is India failing to achieve food security for all despite its democratic institutions, social programmes and economic growth? This MA thesis hopes to add a small piece to the answer by focusing on the access to food security rights among internal, rural-to-urban migrants living in the informal slums of Bangalore. The first part of the thesis explores linkages between migration and access to food in an urban setting.The second part focuses on the relationship and the 'blurred boundaries' between the state, civil society and the migrant households and how this affects the realization of food security rights. More specifically, the thesis compares the implementation of one targeted and two universal social support programmes aimed at improving food security and nutrition in India: the Public Distribution System (PDS), the Mid Day Meal Scheme (MDM) and the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS).